Common Schools and Uncommon Conversations: Education, Religious Speech and Public Spaces

This paper discusses the role of religious speech in the public square and the common school. It argues for more openness to political theology than many liberals are willing to grant and for an educational strategy of engagement over one of avoidance. The paper argues that the exclusion of religious debate from the public square has dysfunctional consequences. It discusses Rawls's more recent views on public reason and claims that, while they are not altogether adequate, they are consistent with engagement. The outcome of these arguments is applied to three 'hot button' issues in US education: creationism, an issue of gay rights, and teaching the Bible in schools.     

Lifelong Education: a duty to oneself?

ABSTRACT There is a strong pragmatic argument that in our times, dominated as they are by continuous change, one's education needs to be a lifelong process. But can another, different, argument be made that lifelong education is a moral duty everyone owes to oneself irrespective of any other pragmatic justijication? The answer evidently depends largely on whether the notion of a moral duty owed to oneself is an intelligible one. In effect, it turns out, on examination, to be very problematic. It is suggested rather that a moral duty to educate oneselffor life can be more coherently grounded in another different notion: one of membership in one's community regarded as a ‘learning society’.